It certainly is a tragedy that we are killing off the polar bears, and it’s great that you’re taking a stand against the tar sands, but please try to stress impacts of the tar sands outside of the arctic to counterbalance the tacit–if not explicit (as you are the “arctic front”, after all)– message you’ll be giving off to the effect that the consequences of tar sands extraction are only a problem in the arctic. That message already has been drilled into people’s heads, so it won’t take much for people to bring those views to your campaign.

Why do you persist in calling Athabasca the “oil” sands. It’s bitumen, a form of tar, that must be refined, at considerable energy and evironmental cost, to produce a synthetic oil. If it was indeed oil, much of the problem wouldn’t exist. Please, “oil sands” is a PR term, in effect a greenwashing of Athabasca. You should know better than to fall for that.

Thanks I’ve heard this point made many times. Looking at opinion research, people do not react any differently to the term oil sands versus tar sands.

Past that, looking at google search volumes for both the terms - a lot of people search for the term “oil sands” while very few if any search for “tar sands.” So as far as reaching an audience through google (a top referrer for us), it makes more sense to target for a term people are searching for.

Where are you guys coming from??? The polar bear numbers are not in decline! Ask the Inuit, there are more polar bears now than there have been for decades. An official count was done over 1 year ago, why did you ignore it?

Tar is man-made. The Oilsands contain Bitumen, clay, sand and water. These are all naturally occurring. The oil that is extracted from the bitumen is oil, it is not “synthetic”, thus the term Oilsands is obviously the correct term. I don’t think you are hurting anyone’s feelings when you call it the “tarsands”, people seem to think that it is a derogatory term. It isn’t, it is just incorrect.

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